Considered ditching the printer for something that works? yes, it would be nice to not have to do so, but given that the cost of the printer is far less than a Windows license... next time you upgrade O/S, get a new printer instead of paying for Windows?
Fair point, but my experience is Linux out of the box (without tweaking the command line) is not consistent like that. I run Mandriva on a fairly crappy Toshiba Laptop from about 2002. Most of the hardware works fine, suspend and hibernate doesn't, but suddenly did work at the 2007.0 version, but then stopped again at the release of 2007.1. Likewise, I've just upgraded to 2008, and now my scanner doesn't work (cheapo Canon USB-powered jobbie, similar age to the laptop), which has worked out the box with XSane since Mandrake 9.
At least with Windows, if it works with one version it will normally work with the next, and if it won't, this is usually quite clear on upgrading (quite a thing was made of hardware compatibility when Windows 2000 came out, IIRC.)
I know the quite valid responses that will come from developers will include ACPI implementation on my old Toshiba being dodgy (very probably), and that my scanner not working is probably an obscure distro-specific bug that no-one else has noticed, and could be fixed quite easily if one knows how (also very probably), but the fact remains that I can reboot into Windows, scan and suspend/resume to my heart's content.
For me this is not too much of a bother, because I know it's an old machine, and I can always reboot into Windows if I want to do any of these things. But it puts me off buying a new computer to run Linux on, because I'm not buying a Windows license just to do scanning (a function I use quite infrequently), and equally not buying a machine on that I cannot reliably use all the functions I wish to use (including scanning), which rules out a Linux system. I don't like the look of Vista, so my choices are sticking with my Toshiba until it becomes unusable, or buying a Mac.
I can relate to that - my school's first "network" consisted of diskless terminals that booted DOS/Windows 3.11 off a remote server. They were almost completely silent, which was great in that the computer room didn't have the overwhelming whirr one often has to put up with, but it was quite unnerving when pressing something, finding it taking longer to respond than you expect, and not being quite sure whether it's crashed, hung or just taking its time. No hard drive LED or crunching noises, no CPU fan getting faster or slower, we literally had no idea.
Often in reality, as one of my old uni lecturers said when showing us round the recording studio, the colour of the LED tells you the age of the equipment: red=1980s back, green=1990s, blue=2000s.
Just today I walked into the "Maximum Quiet Study Area" for our univerisity's library, and popped open my laptop and turned it on. My gkrellm instance sounded my "alert" sound (which is actually very rare, the load was too high from the boot apparently), and I rushed to hit the mute button.
The startup sound on Vista would be before any multimedia keys are registered if it's at all like XP is, and that wouldn't have worked. Laptop speakers don't have volume control!
Get yourself a bare 3.5mm jack plug connector to insert into the headphones socket. Then if you want to mute, just insert it into the socket and it will mute the main speakers and send the sound the headphones it thinks are connected to the connector.
Mod funny? If my school experience was anything to go by then parent has hit the nail on the head. All our IT technicians knew how to do was follow pre-preprinted instruction cards and call the supplier's helpdesk.
> Sure, I think some people would hope that a awful Vista will sink MS. Well, it won't. because if ME didn't, I can't see Vista doing it.
Don't forget ME was only ever targetted at home users and existed in parallel to Windows 2000. Most home users just use what comes with their machine without giving it a second thought. There's a lot more to lose with Vista.
I remember an old Amiga 600 machine I played around with once that seemed to have a floppy disk autorun (the drive was scanned every few seconds - bet they didn't last very long.) Would be interested to know if that was ever exploited!
They'll let you have POP3 in exchange for signing up for "Yahoo Delivers" - ie, you agree for them to spam you occasionally. However, I have discovered that when you get to the bit where you tick the boxes for what kinds of ads interest you, if you don't tick any, you don't get any! I've been using Yahoo in this way via pop3 for years..
I doubt that Win9x users (like me!) would say that - seeing as we've missed out on the IE pop-up blocker included with XP service pack 2, and Win95 won't run IE6 at all, only IE5.5. So franky Firefox is now the only decent browser for Win9x unless you want to pay money for Opera (or have an ad banner)
I do admit that the wrong icon being displayed is a fairly trivial issue, however.
Lol- I once knew a school IT technician that used to glue the little round inserts onto the bottoms of the mice to prevent the balls from being pinched by pupils. OK, so you couldn't clean the insides of the mice any more, but no-one ever bothered to do that anyway.
[p]I really have to disagree with that. 3.1 had a completely different front end interface (program manager vs the start menu), completely different file management system (file manager, short file names etc), and things like control panel are layed out completely differently.[/p] [p]If you really want consistency, compare the Acorn [url=http://acorn.cybervillage.co.uk/emulation/ris cos2/file.gif]RISC OS 2.x[/url] with [url=http://www.houseofmabel.com/puters/RISCOS4/sm all/RO38.png]4.x[/url] (bearing in mind they are 10 years apart). Ok, so things have been made prettier and the logo has changed, but otherwise everything is in the same place.
I wish sometimes that Firefox could not have a more similar user interface to IE, or perhaps a "looks-like-IE" mode. I switched my parents' machine over recently, hoping they wouldn't notice, but of course, Favorites is now Bookmarks, there's no toolbar button to get the history bar up, etc etc...
I know there are various things that can be done to customise it to make it look more like IE, but the fact is most people aren't going to bother with that - they're just going to try it in its default state and if they don't like it, go back to IE.
My favourite mouse button arrangemet was always the Acorn RISC OS system. Three buttons: left: select; middle: menu; right: adjust.
So the left button was the "normal" button, the middle button would bring up the menu (usually including both context-sensitive and general items, so not quite the same as the Windows right mouse button), and the right button would do things like pasting from the clipboard or rotating, depending on application.
Where it got clever though, is that when the menu was brought up with the middle button, the right button would then become "select, but don't clear the menus." This then meant you could use lots of nested menus and put lots of toggle options on them, such as bold/italics/underlines in a word processor, say.
The result of this was that the middle-mouse-button menus were so comprehensive, most applications had no toolbars or menu bars at all, which freed up a lot of screen space.
I find the "no" button useful for sites I haven't visited for a while and am not quite sure of the password. Then I can type it in and see if I've remembered it right, click no, and if it's right then log out and in again and the second time click yes. Then I don't end up possibly saving an incorrect password.
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I can relate to that - my school's first "network" consisted of diskless terminals that booted DOS/Windows 3.11 off a remote server. They were almost completely silent, which was great in that the computer room didn't have the overwhelming whirr one often has to put up with, but it was quite unnerving when pressing something, finding it taking longer to respond than you expect, and not being quite sure whether it's crashed, hung or just taking its time. No hard drive LED or crunching noises, no CPU fan getting faster or slower, we literally had no idea.
Often in reality, as one of my old uni lecturers said when showing us round the recording studio, the colour of the LED tells you the age of the equipment: red=1980s back, green=1990s, blue=2000s.
Just today I walked into the "Maximum Quiet Study Area" for our univerisity's library, and popped open my laptop and turned it on. My gkrellm instance sounded my "alert" sound (which is actually very rare, the load was too high from the boot apparently), and I rushed to hit the mute button.
The startup sound on Vista would be before any multimedia keys are registered if it's at all like XP is, and that wouldn't have worked. Laptop speakers don't have volume control!
Get yourself a bare 3.5mm jack plug connector to insert into the headphones socket. Then if you want to mute, just insert it into the socket and it will mute the main speakers and send the sound the headphones it thinks are connected to the connector.
Mod funny? If my school experience was anything to go by then parent has hit the nail on the head. All our IT technicians knew how to do was follow pre-preprinted instruction cards and call the supplier's helpdesk.
> Sure, I think some people would hope that a awful Vista will sink MS. Well, it won't. because if ME didn't, I can't see Vista doing it.
Don't forget ME was only ever targetted at home users and existed in parallel to Windows 2000. Most home users just use what comes with their machine without giving it a second thought. There's a lot more to lose with Vista.
I remember an old Amiga 600 machine I played around with once that seemed to have a floppy disk autorun (the drive was scanned every few seconds - bet they didn't last very long.) Would be interested to know if that was ever exploited!
They'll let you have POP3 in exchange for signing up for "Yahoo Delivers" - ie, you agree for them to spam you occasionally. However, I have discovered that when you get to the bit where you tick the boxes for what kinds of ads interest you, if you don't tick any, you don't get any! I've been using Yahoo in this way via pop3 for years..
I doubt that Win9x users (like me!) would say that - seeing as we've missed out on the IE pop-up blocker included with XP service pack 2, and Win95 won't run IE6 at all, only IE5.5. So franky Firefox is now the only decent browser for Win9x unless you want to pay money for Opera (or have an ad banner)
I do admit that the wrong icon being displayed is a fairly trivial issue, however.
Word 95 was word 7 (I don't think MS actually referred to it as Word 95, but "Word for Windows 95" or something.)
The best one with Word though is the jump from Word 2 to word 6- catching up with Wordperfect IIRC.
Lol- I once knew a school IT technician that used to glue the little round inserts onto the bottoms of the mice to prevent the balls from being pinched by pupils. OK, so you couldn't clean the insides of the mice any more, but no-one ever bothered to do that anyway.
[p]I really have to disagree with that. 3.1 had a completely different front end interface (program manager vs the start menu), completely different file management system (file manager, short file names etc), and things like control panel are layed out completely differently.[/p]s cos2/file.gif]RISC OS 2.x[/url] with [url=http://www.houseofmabel.com/puters/RISCOS4/sm all/RO38.png]4.x[/url] (bearing in mind they are 10 years apart). Ok, so things have been made prettier and the logo has changed, but otherwise everything is in the same place.
[p]If you really want consistency, compare the Acorn [url=http://acorn.cybervillage.co.uk/emulation/ri
I wish sometimes that Firefox could not have a more similar user interface to IE, or perhaps a "looks-like-IE" mode. I switched my parents' machine over recently, hoping they wouldn't notice, but of course, Favorites is now Bookmarks, there's no toolbar button to get the history bar up, etc etc...
I know there are various things that can be done to customise it to make it look more like IE, but the fact is most people aren't going to bother with that - they're just going to try it in its default state and if they don't like it, go back to IE.
My favourite mouse button arrangemet was always the Acorn RISC OS system. Three buttons: left: select; middle: menu; right: adjust. So the left button was the "normal" button, the middle button would bring up the menu (usually including both context-sensitive and general items, so not quite the same as the Windows right mouse button), and the right button would do things like pasting from the clipboard or rotating, depending on application. Where it got clever though, is that when the menu was brought up with the middle button, the right button would then become "select, but don't clear the menus." This then meant you could use lots of nested menus and put lots of toggle options on them, such as bold/italics/underlines in a word processor, say. The result of this was that the middle-mouse-button menus were so comprehensive, most applications had no toolbars or menu bars at all, which freed up a lot of screen space.
I find the "no" button useful for sites I haven't visited for a while and am not quite sure of the password. Then I can type it in and see if I've remembered it right, click no, and if it's right then log out and in again and the second time click yes. Then I don't end up possibly saving an incorrect password.
Yes, but IE5.5 will run on my old 486 system, whereas both Mozilla and Firefox require a 233Mhz processor.